The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Update ⋅ Paul Sonnier ⋅ Aug 28, 2018 ⋅ #340

I made this announcement to 64,575 members of the Digital Health group on LinkedIn. If you’re on LinkedIn, please do join the group, which allows you to opt in to receiving these announcements in addition to connecting with thousands of other global stakeholders in digital health. I also send out a weekly Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter, which you can sign up for and receive for free, here.

The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Update ⋅ Paul Sonnier ⋅ Aug 28, 2018 ⋅ #340

Announcement to 64,575 Digital Health Group Members

Dear Group,

The CNS Summit 2018 — one of my featured events — has just announced their initial featured speakers. They have another phenomenal and diverse lineup for this year’s meeting, with leaders from Biogen (Peter Bergethon), Datavant (Eric Perakslis), FDA (Bakul Patel), EMA (Valentina Mantua), Headspace (Megan Jones Bell), Hu-manity.co (Richie Etwaru), Intra-Cellular Therapies (Sharon Mates), IQVIA (Cynthia Verst), Luminary Labs (Sara Holoubek), Medable (Michelle Longmire), Merck (Junaid Bajwa), Oracle (Steve Rosenberg), GNS Healthcare (Iya Khalil), Roivant Sciences (Myrtle Potter), Medidata (Glen de Vries), Sage Bionetworks (John Wilbanks), Science37 (Noah Craft), Syneos Health (Alistair Macdonald), Takeda (Emiliangelo Ratti), Trialspark (Benjamine Liu), Verily Life Sciences (Joseph Owens), Yumanity Therapeutics (Kenneth Rhodes), and many more.

Register using code ‘Sonnier2018’ to receive a special savings exclusively for subscribers to my newsletter and members of my Digital Health LinkedIn Group.

My newsletter for Aug 27th is viewable here (with images) and down below (text with hyperlinks only).
Subscribe here.

BOOK
My book, “The Fourth Wave: Digital Health” is available in digital and paperback at Amazon.com, here. You can also learn more about the book, here.

TWITTER
Follow me on Twitter @Paul_Sonnier for all the news I share each day.

SERVICES
I’m available to deliver my keynote address at conferences and corporate events. I also offer event and entity advertising in my group announcements, newsletter, and on my website. Advertising with me puts your event, content, product, and/or service in front of tens of thousands of global readers each week. I’m also available for strategic consulting. Contact me for my media kit, standard plans, and pricing.

FEATURED EVENTS
CNS Summit – Nov 1-4, 2018 in Boca Raton, Florida, USA.

Digital Health World Congress 2018 Winter Edition, Nov 28-29 in London, UK

EVENT PROMOTION
Please contact me for options on event promotion, including having your event featured at the top of this list, featured in my weekly Digital Health group announcements, newsletter, and on Twitter.

SUBMITTING AN EVENT
Please provide the event name, date(s), event website link (direct and not a shortened url), one-paragraph event description, the venue name, and location (city and country). Not all events are relevant to digital health and webinars are typically not allowed, but you can ask me about promotion options.

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The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter for Aug 27

The CNS Summit 2018 initial featured speakers have been announced and they have another phenomenal line up for this year’s meeting! The list includes leaders from Amazon, Biogen, Datavant, FDA, EMA, Headspace, Hu-manity.co, Intra-Cellular, IQVIA, Luminary Labs, Medable, Merck, Oracle, Roivant, Sage Bionetworks, Science37, Syneos, Takeda, Trialspark, Verily, Yumanity, and many more! When registering, please use code Sonnier2018 to receive a special savings just for subscribers to my newsletter and members of my Digital Health LinkedIn Group.

The FDA has granted breakthrough device designation to a digital therapeutic developed by Dthera Sciences, a public company based here in San Diego, CA. According to the company, the “DTHR-ALZ solution is intended to be a prescription digital therapeutic that will deliver Reminiscence Therapy to patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The device will use artificial intelligence to automatically optimize the therapy based on various forms of biofeedback from the patient. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, Reminiscence Therapy is an evidence-based psychosocial intervention that has been shown in clinical trials to improve symptoms of the disorder, but the therapy’s adoption has been limited because of the investment of caregiver time and resources. DTHR-ALZ, however, will seek to provide Reminiscence Therapy with more frequency, consistency and personalization while requiring minimal investment of time and resources.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times best selling author Chris Hedgeswrites in TruthDig that: “The failure to act to ameliorate global warming exposes the myth of human progress and the illusion that we are rational creatures. We ignore the wisdom of the past and the stark scientific facts before us. We are entranced by electronic hallucinations and burlesque acts, including those emanating from the centers of power, and this ensures our doom. Speak this unpleasant truth and you are condemned by much of society. The mania for hope and magical thinking is as seductive in the Industrial Age as it was in pre-modern societies.”

NET NEUTRALITY

After firefighters had their cell phone data speeds throttled by Verizon’s mobile networks during the recent Mendocino Complex fire in California, the company lifted data caps on emergency first responders. The issue is now an addendum to a federal lawsuit over net neutrality. Santa Clara County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden stated: “Our ability to connect is critical to being able to provide for the public safety.”

LIVING AND SOCIETY

UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has proposed establishing a British Digital Corporation that would, among other things, operate a ‘social networking arm that could play a role in direct democracy.’ According to Corbyn: “The public realm doesn’t have to sit back and watch as a few mega tech corporations hoover up digital rights, assets and ultimately our money.” He added that: “A BDC could use all of our best minds, the latest technology and our existing public assets not only to deliver information and entertainment to rival Netflix and Amazon but also to harness data for the public good. A BDC could develop new technology for online decision making and audience-led commissioning of programmes and even a public social media platform with real privacy and public control over the data that is making Facebook and others so rich. The BDC could work with other institutions that the next Labour government will set up, like our national investment bank, national transformation fund, strategic investment board, regional development banks and our public utilities to create new ways for public engagement, oversight and control of key levers of our economy.”

Facebook is reportedly ranking people via a ‘trust rank’ according to how reliable they judge them to be in flagging pages or stories as being “false news”. However,according to a statement made by the company: “The idea that we have a centralized ‘reputation’ score for people that use Facebook is just plain wrong and the headline in the Washington Post is misleading. What we’re actually doing: We developed a process to protect against people indiscriminately flagging news as fake and attempting to game the system. The reason we do this is to make sure that our fight against misinformation is as effective as possible.”

It’s unclear under what authority Facebook is being charged with “fighting misinformation” and how they decide what meets this vague criteria. It’s a slippery slope when anybody — a person, corporation or government — limits free speech, even indirectly, particularly when there is no transparency or accountability. This story serves as a prime example of the issue. Since Facebook labeled the WaPo article ‘misleading’, would they then rank users highly who tag it as ‘misinformation’ on Facebook?

India’s Aadhaar program is building a biometric database of 1.3 billion people. Tech companies like Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook may be able to access the database, which includes fingerprints, iris scans, and photos. The program is understandably controversial, and a major Supreme Court of India case may soon decide its future.

In an effort to make its brand and products more familiar and appealing to younger customers, consumer products company Procter & Gamble (P&G) has applied to trademark LOL, NBD, FML and WTF. Reportedly, these ‘millennial-friendly’ terms that emanated from the digital revolution and are used extensively in social media, would be used in the marketing of cleaning and air freshener products.

WEARABLE TECH

Yahoo news tech journalist David Pogue published an exclusive story on Fitbit and tweeted that it has “accumulated 150 BILLION hours’ worth of heart-rate data—the biggest dataset in history—and gave me a look at what it reveals! Some real surprises in there.” In addition to heart rate data, Fitbit also knows the age of each user, their gender, where they live, their height and weight, and of course their levels of activity and often their sleep patterns. By looking at all of this information, the company has identified that a high resting heart rate (RHR) is a predictor of early death.

GENOMICS

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb tweeted that: “This year #FDA expects to receive about 250 applications seeking permission to start human studies with novel cell and gene therapy products. By 2021 we expect that annual total to reach 1,000. This field is exploding; and it holds tremendous promise for advancing public health.”

MIT Tech Review’s Antonio Regalado tweeted that an op-ed by micro-biologist and geneticist Andrew Hessel — Who Will Be the Google of Genomics? — “argues in favor of DNA specific online advertising. But 23andMe and others recently avowed they wouldnt do this.” The subtitle of Hessel’s piece is telling: “The first company to offer whole genome sequencing for free can build the most valuable advertising engine in the world.”

FUNDING AND STARTUPS

A quarter of the 142 startups in Y Combinator‘s summer batch are in the biotech category, which includes food and agricultural tech, healthcare, and genomics. One of the companies is 64-x, which came out of genomicist George Church’s Harvard lab and states on its website: “We harness high throughput genome engineering to enable organisms like E. coli to carry out functions and operate in environments that are otherwise inaccessible.” Other digital health startups include Togg, which is ‘building radar sensors for use in nursing homes,’ and Higia, which offers a ‘bra with thermal sensors that screens its wearers for signs of breast cancer.’

Boston-based Renovia has raised $42.3M. The startup is focused on providing treatments for pelvic floor disorders in women. Its solutions include the leva Pelvic Digital Health System, a smartphone app developed to treat urinary incontinence and a pelvic floor exercise device called the EmbaGYN. The company’s website states that it provides: “A personalized approach to women’s pelvic health: Discovering and delivering innovative digital and sensor technologies to create therapeutic and diagnostic products for women with pelvic floor disorders.”

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Copyright © 2018 Paul Sonnier, Story of Digital Health

Paul Sonnier
Author ⋅ Speaker ⋅ Technologist ⋅ Social Entrepreneur
Book: The Fourth Wave: Digital Health
Founder, Digital Health group on LinkedIn
Creator, Story of Digital Health
Twitter: @Paul_Sonnier
San Diego, CA, USA

 

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